The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Julia K. Duncan

  “Louise Littell—you are Louise, aren’t you?” asked the teacher. “Well, here’s a girl who’s come to us from a Western army post. Her name is Constance Howard, and she doesn’t know a single girl. Don’t you think you two might be happy together?”

  Constance smiled again, and Louise warmed perceptibly. Louise was the least friendly of the three Littell girls.

  “I’ll let you play my ukulele,” offered Constance eagerly.

  “Let me. She doesn’t know a ukulele from a music box,” said Bobby, with sisterly frankness. “Come on, girls, let’s go up and see our rooms.”

  They tramped up the broad staircase and crossed one of the bridges to find themselves in a delightful, sunny building with corridors carpeted in softest green. The rooms apparently were all connecting, and the teacher who met them said the eight friends might have adjoining rooms as long as “they gave no trouble.”

  “I’m your corridor teacher, Miss Lacey,” she explained.

  “Let’s be glad she isn’t the one we saw on the train,” whispered the irrepressible Bobby, as they all trooped into the first room.

  CHAPTER XI

  FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  It was soon settled that Betty and Bobby were to have the center room in a suite of three and Libbie and Frances should be on one side of them, and Louise and Constance Howard on the other. There was a perfectly appointed bathroom opening off the center room which the six were to share. Norma and Alice Guerin were given a room that adjoined that occupied by Libbie and Frances, but nominally, Miss Lacey explained, they would be considered as a unit in the next suite of three connecting rooms. Fortunately two very friendly, quiet girls drew the room immediately next to the Guerin girls.

  “But, Betty, listen,” whispered Norma Guerin, drawing Betty aside as a great bumping and banging announced the arrival of the trunks. “Who do you suppose has the room next to the Bennett sisters? Ada Nansen and Ruth Gladys Royal!”

  “You are in hard luck!” commented Bobby, who had overheard, as she danced off to open the door to the grinning expressman.

  “All the porters are busy!” the man explained.

  “So I just told ’em Tim McCarthy wasn’t one to stand by and let work go undone. Where would ye be wantin’ these little bags put now?”

  He had a trunk on his back that, as Bobby afterward remarked to Betty, “would have done for an elephant.”

  “Girls, whose trunk is this?” demanded Bobby.

  “Not mine!” came like a well-drilled chorus.

  “‘Miss Ada Nansen,’” read Betty, examining the card. “Bobby, that’s one of the five!”

  They directed the perspiring expressman to the right door and, it is to be regretted, shamelessly peeped while he toiled up and down bringing the five trunks and three hat boxes. Then he began on the baggage consigned to Ruth Gladys Royal, and the watchers counted three trunks.

  Betty looked at the Guerin girls and laughed.

  “Eight trunks!” she gasped. “They can’t get that number in one room. Not and have any room for the furniture. Norma, do go and see what you can see.”

  Norma sped away, and returned as speedily, her eyes blazing.

  “What do you think?” she demanded furiously. “They’ve had some of ’em put in our room, three I counted, and two in the Bennett girls’ room. They’re as mad as hops!”

  “The Bennett girls are my friends,” declared Bobby Littell sententiously. “I only hope they’re mad enough to hop right down to the office and explain the state of things.”

  But the luncheon gong sounded just then, and a laughing, colorful throng of femininity swept down the broad stairs to the dining room.

  “How lovely!” said Betty involuntarily.

  There were no long tables in the large, airy room. Instead, round tables that seated from six to eight, each daintily set and with a slender vase of flowers in the center of each. Betty and Bobby had the same thought at the same moment.

  “If we could only sit together, all of us!” their eyes telegraphed.

  “They’re all taking the tables they want and standing by the chairs,” whispered Betty. “Let’s do that.”

  A table set for eight was close to the door. Betty, Bobby, Louise, Frances, Libbie, Constance, Norma and Alice gently surrounded this and stood quietly behind the chairs.

  Some one, somewhere, gave a signal, and the roomful was seated as if by magic.

  “I see—those four tables over by the window are for the teachers,” whispered Betty. “I see Miss Anderson and Miss Lacey, and that white-haired woman must be the principal. Yes, and girls, there’s that woman whom the boys tormented so on the train!”

  Sure enough, there she was, looking even more severe now that her hat was removed and her sharp features were unrelieved.

  “If this isn’t fun! I’m sorry for poor Esther at Miss Graham’s,” said Bobby, looking about her with delight. “Mercy, what do you suppose this is?”

  One of the young clerks from the office approached the table, a large cardboard sheet in her hand.

  “I’m filling in the diagram,” she explained. “You mustn’t change your seats without permission. Tell me your names, and I’ll put you down in the right spaces.”

  Betty looked over her shoulder as she wrote down their names. Like the diagram of the seating space of a theatre, the tables and chairs were plainly marked. Betty swiftly calculated that between one hundred and twenty-five and one hundred and fifty girls must be seated in the room. Later she learned that the total enrollment was one hundred and sixty.

  Just outside the dining room was a large bulletin board, impossible to ignore or overlook. When they came out from luncheon a notice was posted that Mrs. Eustice would address the school at two o’clock in the assembly hall in the main building. It was now one-thirty.

  “Let’s go look at the gym,” suggested Bobby. “We have time. Oh, how do you do?”—this last was apparently jerked out of her.

  “I didn’t know you were coming to Shadyside, Bobby,” said Ruth Gladys Royal effusively. “Do you know my chum, Ada Nansen? She’s from San Francisco.”

  “Constance Howard is from the West, too—the Presidio,” said Bobby.

  Gracefully she introduced the others to Ada and Ruth who surveyed them indifferently. The Littell girls they knew were wealthy and had a place in Washington society, but the rest were not yet classified.

  “Haven’t I seen you before?” Ada languidly questioned Betty. “You’re not the little waitress—Oh, how stupid of me! I was thinking of a girl who looked enough like you to be your sister.”

  Bobby bristled indignantly, but Betty struggled with laughter.

  “I remember you,” she said clearly. “You had the wrong seat on the train from Oklahoma.”

  Ada Nansen glanced at her with positive dislike.

  “I don’t recall,” she said icily. “However, I’ve traveled so much I daresay many incidents slip my mind. Well, Gladys, let’s go in and get good seats. I want to hear Mrs. Eustice; they say she is a direct descendant of Richard Carvel.”

  “We might as well go in, too,” said Bobby disconsolately. “She’s used up so much time we couldn’t do the gym justice.”

  Promptly at two o’clock, white-haired Mrs. Eustice mounted the platform and tapped a little bell for silence.

  The principal was a gracious woman of perhaps fifty. Her snow-white hair was piled high on her head and her dark eyes were bright and keen. Wonderful eyes they were, seeming to gaze straight into the youthful eyes that stared back affectionately or curiously as the case might be. Mrs. Eustice’s gown was of black or very dark blue silk, made simply and fitting exquisitely. Straight, soft collar and cuffs of dotted net outlined the neck and wrists, and her single ornament was a tiny watch worn on a black ribbon.

  “I wish Ada Nansen would take a good look at her,” muttered Bobby.

  “I am so glad to welcome you, my girls,” began Mrs. Eustice.

  Betty thrilled to the magic of that modulated voic
e, low and yet clear enough to be heard in every corner of the large room. Surely this lovely woman could teach them the secret of cultivated, dignified and happy young womanhood.

  The principal spoke to them briefly of her ideals for them, explained the few rigid rules of the school, and asked that all exercise tact and patience for the first week during which the rough edges of new schedules might reasonably be expected to wear off.

  “I want to have a little personal talk with each one of you,” she concluded. “Your corridor teachers will consult with me and will tell you when you are to come to me. And I hope you are to be very, very happy here with us at Shadyside.”

  A soft clapping of hands followed this speech, and Mrs. Eustice stepped down from the platform to be instantly surrounded by the girls who had spent other terms at the school.

  After the older girls had spoken to the principal, the newcomers began to move forward. They were presented by their corridor teachers, who seemed to possess a special faculty to remember names, and here and there Mrs. Eustice recognized a girl through the association of ideas.

  As Miss Lacey swept her girls forward, Ada Nansen and Ruth Gladys Royal happened to head the ranks. Mrs. Eustice put out her hand to Ada, then gazed down at her in evident astonishment.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE LOST TREASURE

  “Diamonds,” whispered Betty to Norma Guerin, who seemed depressed. “She wears three diamond rings and one sapphire and a square-cut emerald. And her wrist-watch is platinum set with diamonds.”

  Mrs. Eustice gazed at the soft little hand she held for a few moments, then released it. She said nothing.

  “Ah, your mother wrote me of you,” was the principal’s greeting to the Littell girls. “You look like her, Louise. And Bobby is much like her father as I remember him.”

  “This is Betty Gordon,” said the loyal Bobby, indicating her chum. “Mother wrote about her, too, didn’t she?”

  “Indeed she did,” assented Mrs. Eustice warmly. “I must have a special talk with Betty soon, for she has an ambitious program before her. And here are Libbie and Frances from the state I remember so affectionately from girlhood visits there.”

  But it was Norma and Alice Guerin, sensitive Norma and shy Alice, who were welcomed most cordially after all.

  “So you are Elsie Guerin’s daughters!” said the principal, putting an arm around Norma and holding her hand out to Alice. “My own dear mother taught your mother when she was a little girl with braids like yours. And your dear grandmother used to give the most wonderful parties. People talk about them to this day. It was at her Rose Ball I first met my husband. You must go up the north road some day and see the old Macklin house.”

  Norma and Alice fairly glowed as they went back to their rooms with the other girls. Ada Nansen had heard, and she was regarding them with evident respect.

  Norma and Alice might have been uneasy had they heard Ada’s comment when she and Ruth were once more in their own rooms.

  “They must have money,” argued Ada, “though I never saw such ordinary clothes. Giving balls and parties in the lavish Southern style costs, let me tell you. Probably they have some fine family jewels in that shabby trunk.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said Ruth Gladys wisely. “I think the money is all used up. Probably they’re here as charity pupils for old friendship’s sake.”

  This speculation was duly stored up in Ada Nansen’s mind to be brought out when needed.

  After dinner Miss Anderson played for them to dance in the broad hall, but every one was tired from train journeys, and at nine o’clock they voluntarily sought their rooms.

  “Get into a kimono and brush your hair in here,” hospitably suggested Betty, and Bobby seconded her by flinging the suitcases under the beds. All of the rooms were fitted with pretty day-beds so that a cover quickly transformed them into couches and the bedrooms into sitting rooms.

  Four gay-colored kimono-wrapped figures came pattering in presently and curled up comfortably on the beds. Norma and Alice were the last to arrive, and when they did come they mystified their friends by prancing in silently and waltzing gaily about the room.

  “Oh, girls!” they chortled when they had tired of this performance, “what do you think?”

  “We couldn’t help hearing,” said Norma deprecatingly.

  “Laura Bennett called us in,” declared Alice.

  “Don’t sing a duet,” commanded Bobby sternly. “What are you talking about? One at a time. You tell, Norma.”

  “Laura Bennett called us into her room,” obediently recited Norma. “Miss Lacey was talking to Ada and Ruth. You could hear every word without listening—that is without eavesdropping—you know what I mean. Mrs. Eustice must have spoken to Miss Lacey, because she told the girls they would have to send all the trunks home except one apiece. Ada must put all her jewelry in the school safe and at the Christmas holidays she is to take it home and leave it there. Both of them have to wear their hair down or in a knot—you know they have it waved now and done up just like my mother’s. And Miss Lacey is to go over their clothes to-morrow and tell ’em what they can keep!”

  “I’m glad some one has some sense!” was Bobby’s terse comment.

  Something in Norma’s face told Betty that she would like to speak to her alone, so half an hour later when the girls had dispersed for the night, she made a bent nail file an excuse to go to the Guerins’ room.

  “I was hoping you’d come, Betty,” said Norma gratefully. “We have to put out the lights at ten, don’t we? I’ll try to talk fast. You see, Alice and I want to tell you something.”

  A fleecy old-fashioned shawl lay across the bed and Norma flung this about Betty’s shoulders.

  “Alice’s kimono is flannel and so is mine,” she explained in answer to the protest. “You never met Grandma Macklin, did you, Betty?”

  “No-o, I’m sure I never did,” responded Betty thoughtfully. “Does she live with you?”

  “Yes. But while you were at the Peabodys she was visiting her half-sister in Georgia,” explained Norma. “She is mother’s mother, you know.”

  “What was it Mrs. Eustice said about her?” questioned Betty with interest. “Did she live near here? Was that when your mother went to this school?”

  “It was a day school then, you know,” put in the laconic Alice.

  “Yes, and grandma lived in a perfectly wonderful big house,” said Norma. “It must be fully five miles from here. Uncle Goliath, an old colored man, used to drive her over every day and call for her in the afternoon. Mother has always been determined Alice and I should graduate from Shadyside.”

  “Well then, it’s lovely she is to have her wish,” commented Betty brightly.

  “Oh, goodness, I don’t see that we’re ever going to have four years,” confessed Norma. “If you knew what they’ve given up at home to send us for this term! And though we wouldn’t say anything, mother and grandma worked so hard to get us ready, Alice and I are positively ashamed of our clothes. You see, Betty, I think when you’re poor, you ought to go where you’ll meet other poor girls. Alice and I ought to have entered the Glenside high school, I think. But when I said something like that to dad he said it would break mother’s heart. But if she knew how hard it was to be poor and to have to rub elbows with girls who have everything—”

  “I don’t think you ought to feel that way,” urged Betty. “You have something that no amount of money could buy for you, and no lack can take away—birth and breeding. And the training your mother wants you to have is worth sacrificing other things for. Ever since I heard Mrs. Eustice talk I feel that I know what makes her school really successful.”

  A soft tap fell on the door.

  “Lights go off in ten minutes, girls,” said Miss Lacey pleasantly.

  “Do you know, Betty,” confessed Norma hurriedly, “dad has lost quite a lot of money lately. He’s such a dear he never can bear to press payment of a bill and half the county owes him. And a friend got him
to invest what he did have in some silly stock that never amounted to a hill of beans, as the farmers say. So it’s no wonder the Macklin fortune worries mother whenever she thinks of it; a family like ours could use money so easily.”

  “Most families are like that,” said Betty, with a flash of Uncle Dick’s humor. “I didn’t like to ask, Norma, but your grandmother must have been wealthy.”

  “She was,” confirmed Norma. “Not fabulously so, of course. But even in those days when lavish hospitality was common Grandma Macklin was famous for the way she ran the estate. She was left a widow when a very young woman, and mother was her only child. Her husband didn’t believe women knew very much about money, and he left his fortune mostly in bonds and jewels—the most magnificent diamonds in three counties, grandma says hers were. And she had a rope of emeralds and two strings of exquisitely matched pearls. Besides, there were rose topazes and lovely cameos and oh, goodness, I couldn’t repeat the list; Alice and I have been brought up on the story.

  “Well, about the time mother had finished school, Grandma Macklin came to the end of her bank account. Several mortgages had been paid her in gold, and she kept this money with the jewelry and a lot of solid silver in a little safe in her room. Foolish, of course, but she says others did it in those days, too. She meant to take the gold and some of the diamonds to her lawyer and get a check which would take her and mother around the world on a luxurious cruise. And the day before she had the appointment with Mr. Davies—”

  A soft blackness settled down over the girls like a blanket. The electric lights had gone out!

  “Move closer, and I’ll finish,” whispered Norma.

  Betty snuggled up between the two, and shivered a little with excitement.

  “The day before she was to drive to Edentown,” repeated Norma, “a band of Indians from the reservation in the next state came through on their annual tramping trip and walked in on poor little grandma as she sat at her mahogany secretary turning over her jewels and counting her beautiful shining gold. Every darkey on the place fled in terror, and those rascally Indians simply scooped up everything in sight and locked grandma and mother in the room!”